LIMES GERMANICUS. The Latin limes denoted a path, a boundary path, or boundary ; hence it was utilized to denote fron tiers marked in some distinct fashion. In the sense of frontiers, the term has been extended by modern historians. Thus the Wall of Hadrian in North England (see BRITAIN : Roman) is now some times styled the Limes Britannicus, and so forth. In particular the frontier lines which bounded the Roman provinces of upper (southern) Germany and Rhaetia, stretching from near Bonn on the Rhine to near Regensburg on the Danube, are called the Limes Germanicus. The history of these lines is the subject of the following paragraphs. They have become much better known through systematic excavations and other researches, and though many details are still doubtful, their general development can be traced.
From the death of Augustus (A.D. 14) till after A.D. 7o, Rome accepted as her German frontier the water-boundary of the Rhine and upper Danube. Beyond these rivers she held only the fertile plain of Frankfurt, opposite the Roman border fortress of Mogun tiacum (Mainz), the southernmost slopes of the Black Forest and a few scattered tetes-du-pont. The northern section of this fron tier, where the Rhine is deep and broad, remained the Roman boundary until the empire fell. The southern part was different. The upper Rhine and upper Danube are easily crossed. The frontier which they form is inconveniently long, enclosing an acute-angled wedge of foreign territory—the modern Baden and Wiirttemberg. Geographical convenience and movements of Roman subjects across the Rhine combined to urge a forward policy at Rome, and Vespasian began a series of advances which gradually closed up the acute angle, or at least rendered it obtuse.
tended the Roman territory east of it, and enclosed the whole within a systematically defended frontier with numerous block houses along it and larger forts in the rear.
Among the blockhouses was one which by various enlargements grew into Saalburg fort, near Homburg. This advance necessitated a third movement, the construction of a frontier, connecting the annexations of A.D. 74 and 83. The line of this frontier ran from the Main to the upper waters of the Neckar, and was defended by a chain of forts. The whole was reorganized, probably by Hadrian, with a continuous wooden palisade reaching from the Rhine to the Danube. Either Hadrian or Pius marked out a new frontier roughly parallel to, but in advance of, these two lines.
This is the frontier which is now visible and visited by the curious. It consists of two distinct frontier works; one, known as the Pfahlgraben (or "Pale"), is an earthen mound and ditch, best seen in the neighbourhood of the Saalburg, but which once extend ed from the Rhine southwards into southern Germany. The other, . which begins where the earthwork stops, is a stone wall, though not very formidable, the Teufelsmauer ("Devil's Wall") ; it runs roughly east and west parallel to the Danube, which it finally joins at Hienheim near Regensburg. The Pfahlgraben is extraordinarily direct in its southern part, which for more than 5o m. runs math ematically straight and points almost absolutely true to the Polar star. It is an ancient frontier laid out in American fashion. This frontier remained for about I oo years, and no doubt in that long period much was done to it. The exact date even of the Pf ahl graben and Teufelsmauer is uncertain. But the pressure of the barbarians began to be felt seriously in the latter part of the 2nd century A.D., and the whole or almost the whole district E. of the Rhine and N. of the Danube was lost about A.D. 2 50.